12.25.05: Trip to the Philippines

Manila: Why am I here?

(See previous postings re: Here Lies Love.)

Here’s a quote from James Hamilton-Paterson’s book America’s Boy, one of the best accounts of the Marcos era, putting it in the context of both village life and global politics. From the chapter "The Politics Of Fantasy":

“There are moments when it seems that the world’s affairs are transacted by dreamers. There is a sadness here in the spectacle of nations, no less than individuals, helping each other along with their delusions. This way what is thought to be clear sighted pragmatism may actually be shoring up a regime’s ideology whose hidden purpose is itself nothing more than to assuage the pain of a single person’s unhappy past.”

And these quotes from "Imperial Grunts":

“Just as the stirring poetry and novels of Rudyard Kipling celebrated the work of British Imperialism…the American artist Frederic Remington, in his bronze sculptures and oil paintings, would do likewise for the conquest of the Wild West.”

“‘Welcome to Injun Country’ was the refrain I heard from the troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq…the War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier.”

These two quotes encapsulate for me why I am here in the Philippines. Granted it is a very short trip. And at a peculiar time of year. The Here Lies Love music project might be about this conflation of fantasy, personal pain and politics that runs through history and that played itself out here in a dramatically obvious way. Hamilton-Paterson nails it better than I could.

I suppose besides gathering some more research and archival material (hours spent watching archival materials and looking through old books at the Cultural Center are missing from this journal.) I hope also to catch and absorb some whiff of the Philippine ethos, sensibility and awareness — by osmosis — and by conversation, too. I believe that politics is an expression of the landscape —  the streets, eroticism and hum-drum lives — as much it is of backrooms, ideologies and legislature. Geography, religion, sex, weather, music, food — these all contribute to a national policy and how it functions.

As in current genetic thinking, the word “expression” is appropriate here; just as there are elements in the genes waiting for chemical keys to allow the cells to express themselves as a chicken liver or a human heart, there are elements in a place that trigger expression in action and in culture. Much human behavior is a kind of expression of latent keys — genetic or geographical and cultural — unlocking tiny doors.

Joel Torre, an actor, generously met me at the airport,  and everyone said hi to him as we walked to the car pickup area. We drove by the Cultural Center on the way to the hotel — a giant Lincoln-Center-type edifice that Imelda built.

The disco music has stopped outside my hotel. I must say, given that I’m filled with thoughts of the HLL project, the music is actually inspiring rather than annoying — though I’m glad it doesn’t go on all night. A song with a radical synth squealy pulse gave me some ideas. A cover of “In Da Club” was the last thing I heard as I pedaled towards the old city center. (I brought my folding bike.)

Binondo is the area I end up biking to. Karaoke machines are everywhere. Even little stalls in the funky old city center have them. This is an area of crowded winding streets and vendors with tiny one-table emporiums. The traffic slows in these areas, or is relegated to bikes and little trucks that bring supplies and goods to the vendors, but other traffic avoids these areas, as the narrow streets are too crowded with pedestrians and the overflow from the stalls. Here the Jeepneys are the largest vehicles — slowly inching forward while attempting to pick up passengers — but I move faster than most of them on my bike. It’s a great place for walking, and for and buying fruits, vegetables, washcloths, bootleg CDs and DVDs, Christmas gifts (at this time of year,) fresh fish, medicines — anything that can be displayed stacked in little piles on wooden tables.

Why is it that all 3rd world markets are the same? I was reminded of Kuala Lumpur, Cartagena, Marrakech, Salvador, and Oaxaca, and many other places. It’s almost as if these areas were all designed by the same person the world over — they organically take the same form everywhere. The human scale and pleasant chaos are part of the unconscious though carefully worked out plan, as are the smells and piles of refuse here and there. One of the stall owners sweeps the rainwater and mud out of the street with a broom. There is a system of maintenance. I suppose it’s a case of similar goods and scale automatically self regulating the manner in which they are all sold, how and where. I’m glad the whole city hasn’t been malled, as some of the guidebooks claim. This is a really nice area to stroll in if you don’t mind smells and bustle.

Oddly enough, one could say some of the same things about the more built-up areas of many cities — that many of them could have also been designed by the same person — the most widespread ubiquitous designer in the world. Mr. High rise and mall design at your service. Somehow I think there is a little more conscious borrowing at work in the business towers and mall design than in this pleasant hodge podge of stalls and tiny shops.

Along the bayside walk closer to my hotel there are outdoor restaurants, many of which feature cover bands. As rumored, the bands are all surprisingly good — if by good you mean amazingly faithful in their ability to reproduce well known songs. The singing and playing is uniformly competent and professional, though of course unoriginal, which is by design. One man sings on a little stage with glowing plastic Santas on either side of him. I wonder if I should reconsider using one of these bands or these singers for HLL?

I bike past the U.S. embassy, which I first mistook for either a military base or a walled in luxury hotel complex.

Sol’s History Lesson

I meet up with a group of people whom I’d previously contacted at film director Antonio “Butch” Perez’s apartment, which is conveniently around the corner from the hotel. Marcos’ former cameraman Edgar Navarro and his very pregnant wife sit beside me and we are joined by editor Jessica Zafra (her magazines Flip and Manila Envelope, both in English, are wonderful,) poet and columnist Krip Yuson, photographer Neal Oshima, restauranteuse Susan Roxas, performance artist Carlos Celdran, adman David Guerrero, …and eventually even more filmmakers and writers.

Butch’s place is beautiful — tropical Zen sparse decor with a view over some tin roofs to the expanse of Manila Bay. “Not so many years ago this was one of the quietest places in town,” he says. “But now there are car stereos and burglar alarms, police klaxons and sirens, open-air karaoke on the bayfront and more scooter traffic, so the noise level is so much higher.” As a New Yorker I’m used to it.

I describe the HLL project to everyone as best I can, which isn’t saying much. The CD of demos I brought and especially the compilation of Peter’s rough video edits explains the concept much better than I am able to. The videos especially are well received — though some of these folks view them as if their own lives were being replayed, so theirs is hardly an objective view. Painful memories, some of them.

Sol Vanzi joins us — she lives on the same floor. She informally handles Imelda’s relations with local and international media. She runs a website that collates Philippine news: http://www.newsflash.org. She’s 61, she tells us, and she immediately sits down, opens a beer and launches into a tirade during which she disputes all the conventional wisdom about the Marcos regime and Imelda. She just naturally assumes (rightly, I suspect) that she’s not addressing a group of loyalists.

She says, for example, that she instructed a video cameraman to hide in the basement of the palace when it was being overrun — after the Marcoses fled — with instructions to videotape the state of things as they were the moment the family left. She claims that this video shows that the various stories of half-eaten tubs of caviar and other evidence of excess were “urban myths”, as she referred to them. Proof that these things were planted — by Cory Aquino and others, so she claims.

She also claims the Americans most likely killed Aquino (I thought Marcos said it was the Commies?) and that Imelda was never poor as a child. This latter claim is relative; she certainly wasn’t as poor as the people living in the shanties squeezed along the riverbanks:

— but, well, by all accounts she did live in a garage while children of the fist wife lived in the house, and then things went downhill from there. As someone from an important local family she was relatively poor.

Sol segues into a riff on the very limited class mobility in the Philippines. How, if you are from a provincial town you are handicapped, even if you are from a “good” family there (this mirrors Imelda’s situation.) Anyway, she implies, as do others, that it is almost impossible to rise above your station — your accent will give you away, and even if it doesn’t folks will ask you where you’re from and then the game’s up. Shades of the UK.

What I also learn, despite all her endless protesting claims that no one has voiced, is that things are not as black and white as I, or many other left-leaning westerners, might prefer to think. The Marcos regime, though corrupt from the start, was no more corrupt, at least at first, than many others. What distinguished them was that they did instigate health programs, highway building, cultural centers, a high school for the arts and many other programs. (The high school produced many of the creative types who are still active.) The Marcoses were truly loved by many Filipinos at the start…and, according to some, they continued to be loved in the provinces even during their ouster, an event which somewhat baffled the country folk. At one point (in the 60s) the Marcoses intentionally modeled their image on that of the Kennedys, posing for family snaps in Malacañang Palace wearing versions of native dress, and looking young and glamorous, which they were. As with the Kennedys, the public loved it, as did the international media; the Marcoses were featured in Time, Life,  etc. etc. Everyone bought into the fantasy, just like they bought into the Kennedy myth, which was around the same time.

Of course, beginning with Marcos’ ‘69 reelection campaign and continuing to when martial law was declared in ’72, the scales gradually tipped, and the chicanery, human rights abuses, murder, corruption and lies eventually outweighed the love and good works. “Here Lies Love” indeed. At first. As power seemed more secure after a reelection it must have been irresistibly tempting to use it — none of that nasty inconvenient time wasting money squandering politicking anymore — power made things more efficient. But it seemed to me that soon enough the need to hold on to that power took precedent over almost everything else — as usual. The palace in the end became a miasma of schemes, intrigues, paranoia and backstabbing.

One book I read claims that Filipino politicians don’t look on politics as a means to realize their ideology as much as a means to hold power. So sometimes politicians there will switch sides if they think they stand a better chance of winning as a candidate from the other party. Marcos did it early on. It worked. The parties seem to be allegiances that can be remade at will, um, much as they are elsewhere, though most other places make a pretense of ideological continuity.

This flexibility goes way back. A “hero” who fought against the Spanish colonial rule, Aguinaldo, felt that Bonifacio, the firebrand leader of the revolution, lacked the requisite military skills, and he broke ranks with him. Aguinaldo made a demand to the Spaniards that in return for peace and a promise that he would leave the Philippines a huge payment would be made in installments — climaxing in a final payment along with a public apology and the playing of “Te Deum” at the Manila cathedral.

In 1897 Aguinaldo signed the deal with Spain in a cave where he was holed up, and upon receiving the money he split, with the cash, for China (or Japan) and in the process suddenly declared his loyalty to Spain (!). What? After all that he just skipped off with the money? (To be fair, the Spanish did capitulate to the peace demands, but with some U.S. help) In ‘98 he returned, and disavowed his disavowal, and then pledged to fight the Americans, who had helped to oust the Spanish. The Americans had decided that the land was too nice to give up. (This war to oust the Yanks lasted 10 years — America’s first dirty war, all but erased from U.S. history books.)

Aguinaldo resurfaced in the public eye again in 1935 when the Philippines became a quasi-independent nation. He ran against Manuel Quezon in the first election, but he lost. Anyway, the point is that he changed colors, back and forth, and no one seemed to mind, or they just took it in stride. He seemed just as passionate about whatever side he was on.

Dinner and karaoke

After Sol’s lecture we head out. Joel has two chicken restaurants in town. We stop at one and a group of us sit around a little wooden picnic type table outdoors. The restaurant used to be simply a counter and a few tables in back, but it’s become very popular — the chicken, the livers on a stick and the garlic rice were delicious. There is a smattering of all ages, races and types hanging out and chatting over drinks and chicken. If there were  dishes other than what we had I didn’t see them — the barbecues installed on the nearby roadside where the birds were being roasted were all filled with legs and livers.

On the way back to the district where my hotel is Butch says he needs to stop at a karaoke bar to say “Merry Christmas” to his production designer and erstwhile muse, Marta, who is now “playing for the other team” and is there with her girlfriend.

We are led by an attendant down a buttery yellow hallway past a series of identical doors and the assistant opens one and there are 4 friends of Butch’s singing to a TV screen. We order beers but fail to join in the singing festivities. Someone programs “Burning Down the House”, maybe in the hopes that I will sing, but I just stare at the screen as a guy that looks like 80s Bon Jovi poses with a guitar while a model house burns. Marta, who is exhuberant and very pretty in plaid pants, sings along, though my phrasing in this song was a little tricky.

It is claimed karaoke was invented here as the Sing Along System in ‘75 by a man named Del Rosario. TVK/Video karaoke clubs are everywhere and come in all shapes and for all incomes. Maybe it’s a way for everyone to sing — singing is therapeutic and fun to do, I know this from experience even though I was a party pooper at the karaoke club. They sing western pop songs here — and some Filipino pop songs too, many of which are in English. Singing western pop songs here is not like singing a foreign song — western pop, especially U.S. pop, was such a part of Filipino culture that they feel it is their own. And it is, in a way. Who can own the experience you have when you hear a song?

There’s even a karaoke TV channel. Endless cheap corny videos with music playing and scrolling lyrics. You can stay at home and sing along with your television. Like some kind of radical conceptual art piece — but super popular.

Makati

The next day I bike up to Makati, the district where Imelda lives now. An area of high rises, gated communities and shopping malls. Not really typical, but a source of local pride.

Biking here is not always easy — there are no bike lanes as there are on the bayshore and the fumes from the jeepneys and motorized tricycles are overwhelming. Here’s a nice jeepney front:

Foreigners notice Jeepneys right away. Freakish progeny of leftover U.S. Army jeeps that have mutated into a kind of cheap tricked-out public transport. (Jeepney rides in Tacloban, where I took quite few, are around 9 pesos — about U.S. 20¢ at the current exchange rate. This can get you as far as the neighboring town or to the airport!)

Jeepney drivers adorn their vehicles with names and sayings. A kind of jeepney wisdom:

“Lovely”
“Mama - Cita”
“Metal Mania”
“Pray for Our Way”
“Grandma’s Pet”
“Reconnaissance patrol”

The traffic sometimes devolves into pure chaos.

The above is borderline gridlock, but mostly it is O.K., and I make better time than most of the 4- or even 3-wheeled vehicles. Jeez I can’t believe I was pedaling through this.

One of the Makati high-rise condominiums was taken over by a group of disgruntled soldiers in ’04, but they were soon ousted.

This, for many Americans, is the land where maids and nurses come from, and that’s all they know about the Philippines. I have to admit I’ve seen quite a lot of men and women in medical attire. The Philippines are anxious that Japan, for example, employ some of the trained medical personnel from here, but the Japanese are uncomfortable dealing with foreigners, and prefer to spend their efforts developing robots to take care of their own mundane needs.

After Makati I explore the landfill area where Imelda built many of her cultural projects — like the Film Center, which now hosts a Korean cast doing an Egyptian themed drag show. The building is haunted, or cursed, as part of it collapsed during its rushed non-stop construction and it is rumored that some of the bodies are still in the concrete. I am told that Koreans don’t believe in ghosts, so that’s why this show is running here.

The Cultural Center and the Folk Arts center are here as well, and those are still quite active.

Malacañang Palace

The next day I ride my bike through a funky shopping district (Quiapo) and through San Miguel (where Imelda grew up on Gen Solano avenue) to get a pre-arranged tour of the Malacañang Palace.

I see the chair where Marcos signed order 1081, the declaration of martial law. On the walls are numerous photos commemorating People Power, the mass movement that ousted the couple in ‘86. Students giving flowers to soldiers, people wearing yellow. Yellow was adopted due to the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” which was adopted in celebration of the return of Aquino to the Philippines — the welcoming crowd wore yellow. Surreal, these pop connections — a connection between Tony Orlando and Dawn and a grass roots uprising that overthrows a dictator — it makes my head spin.

Unfortunately Ninoy Aquino was gunned down at the airport…but Cory and her supporters kept with the yellow from then on.

The large room that commemorates previous Philippino leaders has a glaring absence. They're all here and their memorabilia is on display — except those of the Marcoses, who are relegated to a couple of back rooms. Their absence is a lacuna in history, but the back room makes up for it — commemorative dolls, clocks, and of course paintings.

Here are two famous paintings in which the Marcoses had themselves depicted as the Ur couple of the Philippines — the Adam and Eve of tribal Philippine mythology, who sprung from a piece of split bamboo, the strong man and the beautiful woman:

So, the idea was that they were fulfilling destiny, facilitating a kind of rebirth and renewal of Philippine identity — which did happen to some extent — and these paintings make explicit their wish to become part of the national mythology. Like George Bush and Ronald Reagan wearing Western clothes.

Laoag, Ilocos Norte

I travel to the area where Marcos was from, up north, and the people still like him here. His son Bong Bong (yes, real name!) is the governor of the province and Imee, one of the daughters, is a local congresswoman. In my research it was said that this area was and is like Philippine cowboy country — a little harsher than the more tropical south, and disagreements were, and are, often settled with a gun.

I spy on a map a neighborhood on the outskirts of town named Discolandia, which sounds like it might be appropriate to this project, so I aim my walk in that direction. I wander though a neighborhood of families, residential houses, chickens, little bodegas and then past the bus depot and then sure enough suddenly there is a whole zone of clubs. It’s daytime, so there is no music or activity, except an older woman painting a young girl’s toenails in front of one club. The door is open so I ask if I can have a look. No problem, in fact the older woman escorts me in and hollers something as she leads me further and further into the club which has a few scattered chairs and some Christmas lights dangling.

She brings me to a back room, which is fairly large — it is filled with rude wooden bunk beds, most without sheets. This is where the bargirls sleep and rest, I think to myself. She hollers again and from a further back room emerges an attractive girl in red who immediately escorts me back into the club room, asking, “what would you like? You like girls?” Her face is painted white — as if she is in the middle of a facial. I remember toenail girl had this whiteface as well. With her full red lips she looks like an erotic clown.

Ooohh, now I get it. These places are all whorehouses! Why didn’t I notice all the signs saying “No Condom — No Sex”? Duh! With music and karaoke (naturally) to bide the time while you’re making up your mind. Here are some choices:

I walk on. I see a few girls lazing around, some doing washing and some sitting and chatting over a soda. Signs saying check your firearms at the door. This really is the Wild West — where’s Miss Kitty?

Around the corner is the cockfight arena where a whole bunch of tricycles and cars are parked. A match is in progress. “Register your birds”. I’ve watched cockfights elsewhere, so, though it is a great scene, it’s one I’ve enjoyed before and since I’m not betting there’s not much in it for me.

I thought the epoch of underage sex for foreigners here was over, but it seems not. There are al least two geezers in my hotel sporting Filipinas who don’t seem to be much over 20. On my bike meanderings I’ve seen quite a few more — from Mr. Buster Bloodvessel ready to explode to The Professor out for a nasty holiday. It seems this is the place for a foreign man to get what he never had or get what he craved but was discouraged from indulging in back home. Maybe here one could fulfill that lifelong dream.

Once in a while I do a kind of double take when I spy a couple  — usually an older white man with a very young Filipina — in a hotel or restaurant. Most of them rarely touch, or hold hands, but many times they’ll be having lunch together. I gather there are famous girlie clubs and transvestite bars here and there, but probably the days when the Vietnam soldiers and U.S. military personnel had wild rampages of Rutting and Relaxation are past. Also spied some lonely foreigners with rent boys — one overweight limping Yank with a southern accent had two. In a restaurant he orders them around: “Salt, I need salt…and pepper.” One of the boys dutifully goes and fetches the salt. “Toast, is that toast over there?” One of the boys fetches him 3 pieces of toast. He seems temporarily satisfied. Wonder what the boys say to each other when he’s not around? I can see the temptations of power at work — the more he senses that he has power, the more he will flex it to witness it in action, to feel the pleasure of command.

“Coffee and cigarettes,” he announces. “Coffee and cigarettes is my breakfast back home.”

To be fair, not all western-Filipina relationships are about power or desperate sex. A family in the hotel restaurant is composed of an Australian man and his attractive Filipina wife and their kids. He grumbles and grunts in response to the kids’ entreaties while she texts someone on her cell phone. Hardly a perfect relationship, but not obviously predatory either.

Politics and sex. It has been said that the percentage of institutionalized corruption in the Marcos regime tipped when his affair with Dovie Beams, an American B movie actress, became public and embarrassing. (He may have been somewhat serious about this fling — his carelessness may have betrayed him. She was also canny in making audio tapes and Polaroids as “insurance”.) Anyway, he was screwed.

Conventional wisdom is that it was at this point that Imelda began to gain a firmer grip on the reins of power. When the affair exploded in the press he gave her a fiefdom shortly thereafter — Metromanila — within which she could exercise control and make her own projects with autonomy — and skim the usual piece off the top as well.

Imelda sent hit men to off Dovie, and made a few money offers to buy the “insurance”, but Dovie managed to escape thanks to help from the U.S. Embassy.

Meanwhile, Marcos’ unacknowledged Lupus was getting worse. He was a sick man in the 80s, needing a kidney transplant and dialysis machines. This tipped the scales further in Imelda’s favor. The power fell not only to her, but also to his numerous cronies and lieutenants, none of who were as canny as he. Things began to get pretty ugly. And surreal. With unlimited power and no critical press allowed the possibilities were limitless.

Bong Bong had daddy create a kind of Jurassic Park for his hunting expeditions, or so it is rumored. That’s why numerous African animals — giraffes, zebras, elands, impalas and gazelles — were brought over from Kenya and plopped on Calauit, an island in the south formerly populated solely by aboriginal tribal people. To make an African hunting reserve for Bong Bong. The aboriginal people were relocated to another island, one that couldn’t support their livelihood, so almost immediately a “Back to Calauit” movement started.

These bizarre abuses of power might be slightly amusing — if you weren’t one of the people who had lived on Calauit — but other activities were not so funny. Paranoia set in, naturally, and suspected “agents” and “spies” and “revolutionaries” were disappeared. Even those who managed to get to U.S. soil were not safe.

It’s Christmas and in Wild West Laoag kids are caroling on the streets just after the sun sets. I sing “Joy To The World” along with one group. They expect money — and not just from me, a foreigner. They go house to house, hoping for small handouts…that does not mean a hot chocolate.

You know, I don’t see any of these other foreigners that I spied in the hotel restaurants out and about. Do they stay in the hotels all the time? Do they get air-conditioned taxis to the sights and then immediately retreat to their hotel rooms?

I begin to take motorized tricycles (below, a tricycle and a view from a tricycle) on short trips. My bike is in Manila as I want to make day trips from here. A tricycle affords a limited view, so not so good for sightseeing, but they are everywhere — hailing one takes about a minute. And they look great.

The view from inside:

Coupled with the Jeepneys and buses they make an incredibly efficient public transport system (excepting the pollution they generate.) New York has, strikes aside, a pretty good public transport system, one that rivals, say, Mexico City, though not as clean. But this is much easier — other than the buses, which leave from designated depots and travel mostly intercity, the tricycles and Jeepneys can be hailed absolutely anywhere within minutes. And for a foreigner, they’re cheap. About P5 for a tricycle and P9 or P10 for a jeepney. This comes to about 20¢ or 25¢ U.S. A bus to Batac, or Vigan, a town 80 km away, was about P100. I think. $2 U.S. My hotel, while not fancy, is clean — shower, air con, nice restaurant, quiet, karaoke lounge (natch)… $20 U.S. a night. No free wireless Internet but most U.S. hotels don’t offer that, either.

I catch a bus to Sarrat, where Marcos was born. The house is his birthplace, now decaying and dusty. Furniture heaped in piles and fading pictures of his mom everywhere. Some manikins of the man in barongs, the traditional shirt that he wore as a nationalist cultural statement.

On to Batac, another very small town where Marcos lies in state in a refrigerated class casket. Batac has a great fruit and vegetable market where every conceivable local foodstuff is displayed. Not that different than markets in Oaxaca or Cuernavaca. I buy an orange, as hotel breakfasts tend to serve something like Tang. Come to think of it, there is a surprising Mexican influence here. It seems the Spanish colonists stopped in Mexico on the way here — it was part of their trade route — so some of the local Mexican culture and foods got transplanted. The house next to the Mausoleum is where Marcos grew up, I think. The children use it now, or so it seems, as there lying on the ground is a discarded cardboard package in shreds with Imee Marcos name written on it.

The little museum attached outlines Marcos’ accomplishments — bridges, highways, hospitals and sessions with foreign leaders like Mao and Nixon. It refers to the Marcos’ ouster as a military coup — referring to the defection of some of the generals, which is significant in that it meant that his military enforcers had split ranks. The museum is a capsule version of the mythology he created for himself — his imaginary war record on to his accomplishments mixed with scenes of true public affection. A mythology mixed with fact, and all the more powerful (and confusing) for it. Like a Hollywood movie that depicts “true” events, the past inevitably comes to be perceived as the Hollywood version. Marcos was prescient here. He had two “biographical” films made in advance of his election campaigns that depicted parts of his life “story”. It worked. This reminds me that John Wayne’s director John Ford is quoted as saying "When people prefer the myth to the truth, print the myth." The mausoleum plays Mozart liturgical music creating a creepy haunted vibe, and, as you enter the air-conditioned chamber there are a number of staffs on either side with sculpted metal tops that resemble weird Masonic symbols. Crescent moons, stars, spades, hammers and indecipherable symbology — the security guy couldn’t tell me what they symbolized but the effect is deeply mystical, mysterious, almost Egyptian. His embalmed body sure looks more like waxworks than a real body — the glass coffin is bathed in an eerie blue light and photos are strictly prohibited. Rumor has it that the real body lies deeper below, slowly decomposing and still denied burial along with the other former presidents.

I travel on to Vigan, a small town that was spared the American carpet-bombing at the end of World War II that destroyed the colonial architecture of many of the others. It’s on the UN list of important world historical sites, so though it’s not on the research agenda I catch another bus to have a look. The center of town does indeed abound in the type of old buildings of which a few remain around Laoag and very few in Manila. Mostly wooden structures that withstand typhoons pretty well, but that usually require periodic upkeep because the tropical dampness and termites will destroy them after a number of years. Impermanence is part of life in the tropics. The windows are made of sea shells — little squares of mother of pearl that allow filtered light to enter the upper floors — and can be opened up for ventilation. Many of these in the Vigan town center are preserved and turned into a tourist destination for Filipinos and foreigners, so though many are still lived in, many a ground floor has been turned into an antique shop selling T-shirts and knock-offs.

Here’s one outside the town center that hasn’t been cutesified:

I stop and buy a sweet on a side street. A girl is roasting over coals a concoction held in a bowl shaped by a piece of banana leaf. The leaf gets a little charred around the edges over the coals, but it doesn’t burn. She explains that the sweet is made of coconut (shavings) sugar, egg and milk. It becomes a kind of hot crunchy custard — and it’s delicious. Wonder if I can try it at home, minus the banana leaf?

Leyte

Imelda was born in a small town in the province of Leyte and spent a good part of her formative years in Tacloban, the main city there. Her family, the Romualdezes, still hold power there — the airport is named Romualdez, as is one of the main streets, the local judge and the current mayor, on and on. However, she was from the less successful side of the family — she grew up in a garage and a Quonset hut — though family connections still counted for much. This Cinderella aspect of her past has been whitewashed or tweaked quite a bit, the poverty and pain part lessened, though she would sometimes refer to it in passing. The house they occupied for a while in Manila in a funky neighborhood she had bulldozed, a way of literally remaking her past. Wipe out those painful memories with a bulldozer.

In later years she built a “shrine” in Tacloban, ostensibly to Santo Niño, the baby Christ. The entrance room is a large chapel, but really the shrine is to herself. Jeepneys heading in this direction from downtown Tacloban simply give “Imelda” as the direction. It houses lots of her furniture collection but more importantly a series of lovely dioramas depicting her life story — or her life story as she imagined it.

Here is a nice one of her as a young girl on the shore having a family outing with an image of Marcos looming in the sky, awaiting their fateful meeting:

The rest of the “shrine” is a series of bedrooms and dining rooms — none of which were ever used or slept in. They too are a kind of diorama. Some bedrooms were for Imelda’s children — Imee, Bong Bong and Irene — and others are for, whom? There is a bedroom for every region (several provinces grouped together for development purposes) in the Philippines, and the décor of each is meant to be thematic — reflective of that region. So one room has Italian leather walls made to look like Nipa — palm thatch. Each room also contains one the above dioramas detailing the Imelda myth. There are 15 Stations of the Cross.

The hotel I am intentionally staying at was build by Madame and opened in 1980 on her birthday. It was a place where she could entertain local pals and cronies. It has 2 karaoke bars, a floating bar/lounge filled with foreigners, an empty seafood restaurant, and a restaurant buffet filled with Filipinos.

In the buffet at lunch I heard “Climb Every Mountain” possibly by Tom Jones on an endless loop — for an hour! Climax after climax! Occasionally I could hear diners quietly singing along.

The Philippines did have a written language before the Spanish colonists arrived, contrary to what many of them claimed. However, it was a language that theorists believe was mainly used as a mnemonic device for epic poems. There was simply no need for a written language in a decentralized land of small seaside fishing villages that were largely self-sufficient.

One theory is that written language is primarily an agent of control (a William Burroughs phrase — “Language is a Virus” was one of his claims.) Written language was needed once a top-down administration came into being. That and trade — which needed administrators, too. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names — who had which plot of land, how much did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? How much then do they owe me? Naming and accounting seem to be the primary “civilizing” functions of written language. Naturally, a version of the local oral language gets translated into symbols as well, these non-administrative words sort of go along for the ride.

What’s amazing to me is that what may have begun as an instrument of control has been internalized by us as a virtue, a mark of being civilized. We have conceptually turned what is often an object of oppression into something we think of as good. We accept written language so much that we feel and recognize its presence as a sign of enlightenment — “you too are a cog in a larger system — and that’s good.”

In the 80s a discovery of a “stone age tribe” in a remote area of the Philippines made worldwide news. National Geographic ran a major piece on The Gentle Tasaday, which portrayed their lives as edenic, a kind of Ur people without any of the hang-ups of contemporary civilized lives.

The Marcoses capitalized on this “discovery” (later exposed as a fraud by the post-’86 press) and restricted the area — except for visits by Madame escorting Charles Lindberg (still alive!?) and Gina Lolabrigida for photo sessions. Hamilton-Paterson called the Tasaday a clear-cut hoax in his Marcos book but retracted this a few years later in an article in the London Review of Books, realizing perhaps that in the Philippines, things so seldom are what they seem at first, even edens, even hoaxes.

James Hamilton-Paterson on the sounds of a small village where he lives:

“Sounds have a ringing, precise quality here. Instead of being dampened by so much woodwork they bounce around the [palm tree] columns and are reflected back down by the vaulting palm ribs overhead. Cocks crow; a buffalo groans down by the river; someone chops wood. There is sudden clatter of an iron lid on a cooking pot and a harassed mother’s exclamation “lintik ka!” followed by a child’s laughter. The clarity of the sounds is extreme, like a digital recording of a thousand years ago.”

The pharmacies are filled with skin whitening creams. There are numerous TV ads for these products as well.

There are signs around town advising that there is a 5 PM curfew for those under 18. Somehow I doubt that this is enforced — but it’s there, just in case.

A sign on a building: “The Fraternal Order of Utopia”.

In today’s paper: NPA [New People’s Army] rebels swiped arms from a congressman’s ranch here but left him unharmed. Further south, in Mindanao, a group of 100 NPA killed 2 cops. These incursions by rebels and the NPA seem an almost daily occurrence. I try to imagine what it would be like if rebel armies roamed the U.S., taking over shopping malls, country clubs and multinational corporation campuses. The country would freak out, most likely. Here no one blinks.

A man zips by on a motorcycle with a Santa hat wildly flapping.

One final fantasy image. Imelda as the nurturing mother Goddess:

So, though the Marcoses’ conflation of national mythology with their own lives and political strivings was blatant, it’s also pretty obvious in the staged contrivances and the managed press of the Bush administration, among others. The “story” of the inevitable triumph of democracy the good (and messianic Christianity too) is a potent one for a certain audience, a grand story that the media goes along with, at least until recently. Manifest destiny, the march of progress, of civilization. Once a “story” is “in place”, believed in, accepted, one need only supply the appropriate images and little anecdotes to make it seem self-fulfilling and real. Living “in” a story is more satisfying than not.

Realpolitik sometimes gets in the way, though. The “story” of the U.S. in Iraq does not play well with the actual global scramble for the diminishing world oil resources, nor does the U.S. support for Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, a “democratically” elected dictator who wheels and deal vast oil reserves. There’s a cognitive dissonance here; the two stories can’t co-exist, can they?

The “civilizing” story, old as recorded history, and the desperate greedy need for resources?

The China Airlines flights both to and from Asia have a piped-in version of the Rat Pack doing what they must have thought  of as jazzy “hip” versions of Christmas songs — they (Dean Martin?) do this glottal stop hiccup effect that is supposed to imply feeling, emotion, but is actually just an annoying tic — my favorites are the “jazzy” versions of Silent Night (!) and Jingle Bells. If I didn’t know better it I would have thought it was a parody. Maybe it is — a kind of martini-induced ironic take on Christmas songs. An odd choice for China Airlines, but I suspect the boozy irony got lost.

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Link: Torn and frayed in Manila